


Fever

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Malaria, casefic-ish, other characters appear in minor roles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 17:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8023156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: The Okinawa incident isn't the only secret Jack brought back from the war. Gratuitously self-indulgent h/c set between seasons.





	Fever

**Author's Note:**

> This story came out accidentally similar to [sheron](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sheron)'s [Through a Glass, Darkly](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7808920) \- which is also Jack & Peggy friendship h/c set between seasons 1 & 2, and contains a few similar scenes. It's total coincidence (I was already plotting out this one when she posted that one) ... but if you like this fic, I highly recommend checking out the above one as well!

"See you girls in a few days," Jack announced cheerily, clapping his hat on his head as he breezed through the SSR bullpen.

Peggy looked up from the surveillance photos she was arranging in chronological order on her desktop, just as he vanished out the door. "Days?" she said, surprised, and then with a glance at the clock, "It's only half three!" She'd come to know the habits of the SSR's new chief fairly well, and Jack was reliably one of the last to leave the office. It was rather disconcerting to see him walk out the door when the entire staff was still there.

"Yeah, Chief's off to DC to hobnob with the Washington muckity-mucks," Agent Corben announced from the next desk over. "Said he'd be back Tuesday or so. You didn't know?"

"Apparently not," Peggy said. She dropped her gaze to the case in front of her, trying to squash the surge of irritation at being left out of the loop ... again.

Things were vastly better than they had been, she reminded herself, sliding a photo showing a blurry view of their suspects across her desk to join the rest. She still had to stay on her toes; she could tell it would be easy for the entire office to backslide into thinking of her as their personal coffee-maker and file clerk if she didn't stay active. But she was thriving on field work. Jack was content to keep throwing her cases as long as she was doing well on them, and she _was_ doing well. Aside from a handful of stubborn holdouts in the office, who still couldn't quite handle the idea of going into a potentially dangerous situation with a female agent at their side, the entire office had stopped batting an eye when she grabbed her gun and geared up with the rest of them.

"Hey, Carter, I didn't know either," Agent Minkowski said from the desk across from Corben's. Peggy flashed him a brief smile in appreciation. 

"Yeah, I think it came up kind of sudden-like," Corben said. "It ain't you, Carter."

That was the other thing that had been happening to her more and more: the other agents in the office, especially the younger and newer ones, offering her the same kind of easy commiseration and camaraderie as they did their fellow male agents. She didn't always have to be perfect, to know twice as much as the men did and never, ever screw up in a field situation. She had some leeway for mistakes now. She had, in at least some of their eyes, earned the right to be human without proving herself too incompetent or weak to be in the field.

But there were still those little reminders that she wasn't always invited to all the meetings, that the various branches of the office grapevine sometimes passed her by. It wasn't something they did out of malice, she knew. It was simply that they didn't always take into account what she needed to know.

And at least some of that was Jack, setting the tone for the others. She glanced up at his empty office, and tried not to let it get to her too much.

 

***

 

The next morning, she braved the lion's den of Jack's office in search of some of the files for her latest case. She'd gone over them with Jack a couple of days ago, wanting to get his input before she went to get the appropriate warrants to conduct a raid on the warehouse of black-market former HYDRA tech the SSR had been after for months. (Prosaic stuff for the most part, power cells and prototype guns that probably didn't even work, but not something they wanted to turn up ten years later in the hands of a military junta in an enemy country.) Jack had mentioned that he wanted to have some time to look over her reports, so she'd left them with him. And she'd been hoping to put together the operation this weekend, while the dock district was relatively deserted, but she wasn't going to be able to do that while missing half the relevant maps and records of the black marketeers' recent movements.

The irony, she thought in annoyance as she sifted through Jack's inbox and shifted some of the towering stacks of papers on his desk, was that she was having to rifle his office like a burglar because she'd tried to keep him in the loop, a courtesy he clearly couldn't be bothered to afford _her_. 

At the same time, she knew the depth of her irritation was unjustified. He was her boss. He didn't owe her a close accounting of his movements.

It would be nice if he'd at least tell her enough to enable her to do her job, though.

The files didn't turn up all morning, and Peggy eventually came to the conclusion that Jack must have either absent-mindedly shoved them into his briefcase along with various other ones he was working on, or taken them home to look over and then left them there when he left town. _Honestly._ If only she could just ask ... but after sounding out a couple of the more sympathetic agents to see if anyone had his number in DC (they didn't), she resorted to a desperation move.

The office kept copies of keys to all agents' residences for emergency purposes. This included a key to Howard's house, since Peggy was living there ... a detail which she had very deliberately _not_ mentioned to Howard. She got Rose's replacement on the front desk, Minnie, to open up the case for her, a lockbox kept down in the secure part of the SSR vaults, and picked out the one with the neatly handwritten label _Thompson, J._ "Thanks, Minnie," she said gratefully. "I'll have it back soon."

She'd never been to Jack's place. He lived uptown, in a brownstone converted into nice apartments, not actually that far from the Stark residence that Peggy and Angie were currently sharing. The neighborhood was less swanky than Stark's, but still upscale. There were two keys on the ring; Peggy used the first to let herself into the lobby, and climbed a flight of steps to Jack's flat.

She tried knocking first, just on the off chance that he actually hadn't gone out of town for some reason. If he had, though, she was sure he would have come in to work, so she was unsurprised when no one answered. Very quietly, feeling furtive, she unlocked the door and let herself into his flat.

The blinds were closed, admitting thin shafts of early-afternoon light between the slats. Peggy switched on a lamp. Jack's place was neither fancy nor plain, just somewhere in the middle, and like most of the unmarried agents, he seemed to treat it as a place to sleep more than a place to live. The furniture was solidly made, durable, and new; there were few embellishments or decorations. A few days' accumulation of clutter had built up: clothing items tossed carelessly over the arms of furniture, a towel on the floor, cups and old newspapers and random bits of probably-not-that-classified SSR paperwork scattered on various surfaces. She wondered if Jack had a cleaning lady who hadn't come in for a week or two, since the flat seemed to be clean under the surface clutter.

There was also a smell that she couldn't quite put her finger on. It was sour-sweetish and cloying, and vaguely familiar. It unsettled her, making her feel even more of an intruder as she very quietly tried to move papers on the coffee table, looking for something that resembled her files.

Wait ... under a jacket thrown over the arm of a chair, she detected the edge of a familiar light brown leather case. Peggy shifted the jacket aside. Jack's briefcase. If the papers were in the flat at all, they were probably in here -- but he should have taken it to DC with him. Why hadn't --

"What the actual hell?"

The voice was low and scratchy and came from behind her. Peggy had her gun out as she spun around, only to lower it with mortification bleeding through her startlement as she registered who had startled her, along with his current state of undress.

Jack was standing in the doorway to the room that was most likely his bedroom, squinting against the lamplight. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxers, his hair mussed and sticking up in spikes. She'd obviously woke him up.

 _At two in the afternoon?_ the analytical agent part of her brain pointed out, and she picked out more details: he was leaning against the doorframe as if he needed it to hold him up, he was unshaven and sweaty, and he was visibly shivering. Following quickly on the heels of those realizations, she recognized the smell in the flat, and why it seemed familiar. It was the smell of sickness, a mix of sour sweat and too-close air and a body's chemical reaction to illness; she knew it from the war.

"Have you been poisoned?" The words sounded stupid once she'd said them, but he was, after all, a spy. In her initial rush of reaction, poison seemed a lot likelier than Jack Thompson taking an unannounced sick day and lying about it -- and especially getting sick enough to look at her in that dazed way, as if he couldn't get his eyes to focus and wasn't entirely sure of what he was looking at.

Jack blinked, and his gaze sharpened somewhat. "Why are you in my apartment?" he demanded, with an edge to his rough voice.

Peggy straightened her back. All right, so she'd surprised him half-clad in the middle of a bout of illness. But she had a perfectly legitimate work-related reason to be here. "I need the files for the Red Hook warehouse case. Do you have them?"

She could see him trying to track on that, his glazed eyes going in and out of focus. How on earth had he managed to get this sick in less than a day? He'd seemed fine yesterday.

"Don't know," he said at last, and waved an aimless hand. "Look around. Not like I could stop you, I guess. If it's here, it'll be in the ..." He trailed off, seeming to grope for the word, or maybe for the thought, then shook his head as if to clear it -- which seemed to have the opposite effect, based on how he made a quick grab for the doorframe -- and started to turn away from her, back into the dark bedroom.

"Jack?" Peggy said, and the use of his first name seemed to snag his attention. "Do you need a doctor?"

He hesitated, hanging onto the doorframe. The look he gave her over his shoulder was wry, and somewhat more _Jack_ than his dazed expression from earlier. "It's nothing. Don't worry your head about it, Carter. I'll be back in the office in a few days."

"Quite sure about that, are you."

A grim, lopsided smile surfaced and vanished. "Pretty sure, yeah. Get your file so you can stop trespassing. If you broke my lock, you're paying for it."

"I used the emergency key," she said absently, but her mind was spinning around what he'd said. This wasn't new for him, that much was clear. And she quickly put together his nonchalant attitude with his symptoms -- the speed with which it had come on, his dazed air, and the shivering ... and most importantly, the fact that he'd served in the Pacific ... "Jack, do you have malaria?" Or some other chronic tropical disease, but that seemed the most likely one.

He flinched slightly, and a new wave of shuddering ran through him. "Can't put a trick past you, can I?" It was said without heat, more with a weary resignation. "So, yeah, this ain't the first time, and it'll be over soon, so just ... get your file and scram." He shut the bedroom door firmly behind him.

Peggy stared at the closed door for a moment before turning her attention to his briefcase.

The files she needed were right at the top of the briefcase, jammed in carelessly along with a bunch of other ones. He must have already been somewhat out of it the previous day, she thought as she neatly collated her files and tucked the loose papers back inside -- he wasn't normally that careless. Despite his appearance of normalcy, he must not have been thinking clearly. 

But that was Jack all over, wasn't it ... a polished, sarcastic veneer over depths of weakness and insecurity that he never allowed anyone to see.

Peggy had spent nearly all of her adult life hiding her own fears and failures behind a wall of aggressive and perfectly groomed competence. The only surprise, she thought as she tucked the files into her handbag, was that it had taken her so long to recognize someone else doing the same thing.

... no, it wasn't quite the same, because she was fairly sure that she did not offload her self-directed anger at her own failures onto other people, not in the way Jack had been doing to her, off and on, ever since the Stark case. But she did understand why he didn't want the people who worked under him to see him like this, or even to know about it.

She glanced around the flat, seeing it in a new light -- the clothing and briefcase discarded carelessly when he'd come home and couldn't muster the energy to put them away, the scattered signs of a gradual downward spiral of energy and willpower over the last week or so. There was a pot of coffee half-made in the kitchen, abandoned in the middle of the process as if he'd lost the strength even for that.

It wasn't a pleasant disease, malaria. The Allies had deployed massive mosquito-spraying campaigns during the war, not just in the Pacific but also in Italy and northern Africa. They'd had antimalarial drugs for the troops, but those had been undergoing steady development throughout the war, and were of varying effectiveness. And even with the drugs, it was hard to eliminate the disease completely from the body once it had settled in.

Peggy knew in a vague kind of way that a number of people had come back from the war with the lingering aftereffects of chronically recurring malaria -- periodic bouts of shaking, fever, exhaustion, and pain, with the possibility of organ damage and death. She couldn't remember if Jack had had unexplained absences previously. Of course, before the Stark case, she probably wouldn't have noticed or cared. At most, it would have been a few blessedly Thompson-free days in the office.

Which she could also enjoy now, come to think of it ... a few days of knowing Jack was out of the way and wouldn't be looking over her shoulder and making sarcastic comments as she put together the Red Hook sting.

Instead, she stepped into the kitchen. A dish of automat takeaway, dissected without actually being eaten, was collecting flies in the sink. Peggy dumped it into the rubbish bin. The kitchen was equipped with a shiny new refrigerator, running quietly in the way of the modern ones, which contained nothing but a jar of milk that was going off.

She thought about trying to nurse yourself through a severe and potentially fatal illness with no help, no one to make sure you drank enough water or had something to eat, or to take you to hospital if your fever spiked to lethal levels.

Basically, this was no way to run a convalescence.

 

***

 

An hour and a half later, she used the emergency key to let herself back into Jack's flat, this time armed with a couple of sacks from visits to shops in the area.

She still couldn't believe she was doing this for Jack Thompson of all people.

She cleaned the kitchen and put things away, which didn't take long; Jack's kitchen was definitely the kitchen of a person who spent little time there and cooked rarely. There was no kettle, unsurprisingly, but she found a pan to heat some water in, and made weak tea. She'd also obtained a takeaway container of soup from a delicatessen down the street, and various over-the-counter medications from a local drugstore for pain and fever.

She went and knocked on Jack's bedroom door, resisting the urge to set tea, soup, and painkillers outside the door and flee before the whole situation became even more awkward.

No answer came to her repeated knocks. She wasn't sure if he'd merely decided to ignore her, but if so, she would have expected annoyed comments from inside the room, not this silent treatment. Acutely aware that she'd now abandoned all of her tenuous excuses for being here, and had moved on to blatant privacy violations, Peggy cracked open the door and peeked inside.

The room was nearly dark with the blinds closed, and the stink of illness was much stronger here. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw Jack on the bed, mostly uncovered with the sheets tangled around his legs.

"Jack," she said loudly, and received no reply. He was going to _hate_ having her here. He'd definitely hate it less than dying of fever and dehydration in his sleep, however, so she marched over to the bed and stared down at him with her arms crossed. 

There was nothing about this situation that did not annoy her. She had work to do, she had never liked sicknursing in any case, and she most definitely did _not_ want to nurse Jack Thompson through a bout of malaria. If there ever was a person who would be a terrible patient ...

"Jack," she repeated even more loudly, and shook his shoulder. He was hot to the touch, but his skin was tacky with sweat, which was probably helping keep his fever down. It also meant he was losing fluids, though. She didn't know how much he'd been drinking, but strongly suspected the answer was "not enough."

Jack stirred, groaned, and batted at her hands.

"Excellent, you're awake." She went and fetched the things she'd brought, ferrying soup, tea, phenacetin, and a large glass of water to his bedside table. 

Jack pushed himself up on his elbow and watched her with narrowed eyes and an expression caught somewhere between irritation and puzzlement. He looked absolutely terrible, even in the dim light, very pale with bruised-looking dark rings around his glassy eyes. His lips were cracked and dry, blistered around the edges.

"What are you doing?" he asked in a scratchy whisper of a voice.

"Ensuring that we don't have to break in a new chief of the New York SSR. I haven't time for the paperwork, among other things." There was a bottle of prescription chloroquine tablets on the bedside table. Peggy picked it up and examined the label to locate the dosage.

"Yes ... but ..." He gave up and flopped back down on the bed, wincing visibly as his head hit the mattress. The pillows had been knocked off onto the floor, whether in fever-related thrashing or just trying to find a comfortable position while ill. Peggy picked one up and unceremoniously shoved it under his head. This brought her hand into unpleasant contact with his sweat-damp hair, so she went off to the bathroom, soaked a towel in cool water, and brought it back.

Jack opened his eyes and stared at her in a very puzzled way as she tucked the towel firmly around his neck and head. "Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired," he rasped at last, as she used a firm grasp on his hair to reposition his head so his neck wasn't twisted to the side at what looked like a headache-inducing angle.

"You need to drink," she informed him. "When was the last time you took one of your tablets?"

"Don't remember," he said after a moment, eyelids drifting shut.

Peggy shook him again, which got no results, so she dipped an arm under his shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. He groaned and pressed his fists against his forehead. "Head feels like it's going to explode," he muttered.

"Which is why you need medicine," Peggy informed him.

With Jack propped against her side, and her arm around him to keep him from falling over or escaping, she force-fed him (over his occasional protests) a glass of water, half a cup of tea, a chloroquine tablet, and the maximum dose of phenacetin for painkilling and fever-reducing. Small tremors ran through him as he leaned against her, and she could feel the fever-heat baking off him. It seemed to be rising again. She got a couple of spoonfuls of soup into him before taking pity on him and letting him lie down again.

One thing she had not thought to buy was a thermometer. She touched his forehead with the back of her hand -- hot and dry now, as the fever climbed again. He seemed to have fallen asleep almost instantly as soon as she'd laid him down, or perhaps passed out; it was hard to tell.

She wished she knew more about the usual course of malaria. She had seen a few cases during the Italian campaign, but it was never something she'd dealt closely with. And she didn't know anyone to ask. She had scientific contacts both inside and outside of the SSR, but not medical ones.

If it got too much worse, she decided, she'd take him to hospital. But she also could only assume that Jack had made it through previous bouts on his own, and she wasn't going to panic and rush off to the hospital if _he_ wasn't panicking.

 

***

 

After calling the office to let them know she was out on a case, she spent the afternoon working on Jack's sofa, using a pad of paper and the Red Hook files to plan out her team's approach to the warehouse, and making herself cups of tea on his hob. Every now and then, she wandered into the bedroom to make sure that his fever hadn't risen to dangerous levels (still lacking a thermometer, she was using the general strategy that "if he's not hallucinating or completely unresponsive, he's probably fine") and rousing him to make him drink water and take sips of soup. This was all accomplished with a minimum of complaints and only the very occasional sarcastic remark, by which she assumed that he was still feeling terrible.

She didn't expect gratitude for any of this. Actually, she expected the opposite -- for Jack, once he was feeling better, to lash out or withdraw, taking her nursemaiding as an insult to his pride. It was the way things had been going with them lately. Ever since taking credit for her work on the Stark case, he'd been intensely brittle towards her, overreacting to every perceived slight; sometimes it felt as if any progress they'd made during the case itself had been not just erased but reset to something even more unpleasant and fraught than what they'd had before.

And yet, when they were working on a case together, it was just like it had eventually been in Belarus: they settled into a smooth rapport, each trusting the other to do his or her part. She never would have expected it, but she genuinely _liked_ working with Jack in the field. And, for all that he'd started trying to cut her down again in the office, there were times when she got an almost proprietary sense of pride from him when she actually did get a win, especially when she managed to show up one of the other (male) agents in the office. More than once she'd noticed Jack's grin when she took down an agent twice her size during a training exercise, or nailed a suspect with a precisely placed blow.

Also, she hadn't really thought about it until now, but since their shared Belarus experience, he hadn't once given her his filing to do, or ordered her to make the office's morning coffee ...

She glanced up from her paperwork at the sound of the toilet flushing. A few minutes later, Jack appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, scruffy and drooping; he had, however, made some effort to comb his hair and had put on pajamas. He was carrying the dishes from the bedroom. "Still here, huh," he remarked, his voice still sounding scraped raw, as he crossed to the kitchen. He moved slowly and carefully, as if his bones hurt.

"Someone stole my case files, so I hardly had a choice."

"Uh-huh." He put the tea mug in the sink, and filled the glass from the tap, drinking it in thirsty gulps. Noticing her watching him, he gave her a crooked smile. "It comes and goes. I'll be up for awhile, then back down again. That's how it works."

He did sound a little stronger. "I had wondered how you managed," Peggy said. "How long will this go on?"

"Probably another couple of fever cycles. The drugs cut it shorter but don't knock it out completely." He paused for a moment with his head bowed over the sink, one hand on the tap and the other on the glass which was now resting on the countertop, then took a deep breath, picked up the glass and refilled it. Even those small actions were exhausting him, she realized, understanding now how weak he really was, and how much he was covering in front of her.

Water glass in hand, touching furniture for support, Jack wobbled over to slouch on the other end of the sofa. "What are you working on?" he asked, idly poking at the papers spread out on the coffee table, which she'd cleaned off for the purpose.

"The Red Hook sting. I'm hoping to set it into motion in a week or so." Her original plan to do it on the weekend had been quickly abandoned. She'd been rushing it, and she suspected that if Jack had been healthy, he'd probably have told her so. And she would have argued, even though she knew deep down he was right. An inward smile tugged at her; it had got to the point where she could almost play out both sides of their arguments, having had them so often.

"Hmmm." He reached for one of her sketch-maps of the building, still with that brittle-bone way of moving, like there was glass in his joints. Peggy surreptitiously shoved it his way. "Still planning on going in from the road side?"

"Yes," she said, surprised that he remembered, especially in his current state. "I think it's easiest and will allow us to do it with less manpower. We'll trap them against the water, take advantage of the natural barricade."

Jack set the glass down on the coffee table so he could pick up the map with both hands, holding it close to his face and squinting at it. She wondered if his eyes were hurting him; she couldn't remember if that was a symptom of malaria, but knew it was an issue in a lot of fevers. "Unless they have a getaway boat."

"I was going to put someone out in the harbor."

He raised an eyebrow at her, almost like his old self for a moment. "And were you going to ask your boss before commandeering a boat and driver?"

"Of course," she said primly. "I'm asking you now. Feel free to let me know if it'll be a problem." She rose from the sofa. "Also, I'm hungry. Do you feel up to some dinner?"

"You're offering to cook?" Jack asked, as if suspecting a trap.

In the kitchen, Peggy dumped out the remaining water in the pan she'd been using as a kettle, and lit the gas burner. "No, I'm heating the leftover soup," she said over her shoulder. "There's also fresh bread that I picked up earlier. If you expect something more complicated than bread and soup, you can walk down to the nearest automat yourself."

Jack huffed a tired laugh and reached for another of her crude planning sketches. "Are you planning to put anyone on the roof?"

"Only if you have some ideas for getting them up there without being noticed," she said, searching through mostly-empty drawers for a bread knife and having to settle for a utility knife in a sheath instead. She washed it under warm, running water. "It's not as if our targets can escape that way."

"No, but they could snipe us from the roof."

"Point," Peggy acknowledged.

"As for getting them over there ... isn't there another building close to the target one? We could have them cross between the two roofs. Take up a board or something."

"Too much risk for the benefit we'd get."

"The benefit of not being shot, you mean?"

They continued to debate the finer details of her plan in a mostly-friendly way while Peggy finished laying out their simple dinner of soup and sliced bread, and brought it over to the sofa. Jack picked at his, eating some but not a lot. He was starting to shiver again, she noticed, two red spots on his chalk-white cheeks indicating a return of the fever.

She made more tea, sweetening Jack's from a box of sugar she found in a drawer; he could use the energy. When she came back with the mugs, however, she found that he'd lain down on the sofa and appeared to be asleep, curled on himself and jerking in the throes of fever dreams.

Peggy brought a blanket from the bedroom to cover him. She swiped the papers together, and left the cup of tea on the coffee table near his head, along with a water glass and the various bottles of medications.

She'd given brief thought to the idea of spending the night, but didn't really want to. As he'd said, he had ridden out bouts of the illness before, and Peggy thought he might actually do better if he didn't have to worry about holding it together for her benefit, but could simply allow himself to be sick.

She tucked the papers into her bag, took a last glance around the room to make sure he had all the things he would need, and added a damp towel to the items on the coffee table. Then she let herself quietly out into the hall.

 

***

 

She left Howard's place early in the morning to stop by Jack's before work. She meant to get a thermometer this time, only to find that none of the drugstores in the area were open yet. She settled for picking up another carton of soup from the same Jewish delicatessen where she'd bought the first one, along with some bagels -- something she'd developed a taste for, since moving to New York.

Her knock was answered with a quiet, "Hang on!" and some scrambling around before Jack opened the door. Peggy gave him a critical look-over. He was wearing the same rumpled pajamas from last night, and she wasn't sure if he looked better or worse. He definitely didn't look good. He was, however, vertical, which she decided to count as an improvement over yesterday, and the flat smelled of coffee. 

"I brought breakfast," she said, lifting the sack.

"Hooray," Jack muttered, stepping back to let her in. 

As she spread out the contents of her sack on the countertop, Peggy noted that the box of tea had been moved to the back of the counter, hidden behind the coffee. She put on a pan of water to heat anyway. She was almost getting used to doing that.

When she looked around, Jack was sitting on the sofa with the rumpled blanket pushed to the side, resting his head in his hands. He looked up and gave her a smile that was really more of a grimace. "You know, you _really_ don't have to keep dropping by."

"I know," she said, spreading cream cheese on a bagel, and bit into it. Around the mouthful, she remarked, "Consider it your personal cross to bear, for telling the office you were on a business trip when you're actually lounging around your flat."

Jack stretched out on the sofa and threw his arm over his face. "I think _you're_ my personal cross to bear, Carter."

"I shall take that as a compliment."

She made her tea and brought that and a second bagel (having eaten the first) to the coffee table, along with a small bowl of soup for Jack and half a bagel. He glared at them, and her.

"I see you've reached the 'cross and unpleasant' stage of convalescence."

Jack rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. "It's so damned inconvenient," he said after a moment. "I can usually feel an attack coming on in time to find a reason to spend a few days at home. There's just not a lot I can do about it otherwise." He turned his head to the side, giving her a look that wasn't angry; it was almost beseeching. "It doesn't happen _that_ often, in case you were wondering. I mean, I don't make a habit of this."

She wondered if he thought _she_ thought he was malingering, and was unprepared for the wave of ... something, some softer emotion than she was generally used to feeling in Jack Thompson's presence. "I didn't think you did," she said gently. "Do you want to go over some of the finer points of strategy in the way we'll deploy the team around the warehouse? It will depend on how many men we can get, of course."

Jack pushed himself up on the sofa. "And that will depend in large part on whether Ferguson's team has finished mopping up the mutant killer deer population in rural Pennsylvania yet. As for your boat, I've got some ideas about that ..."

After a little while, she was pleased to notice him put out an absent hand for the half bagel she'd left in easy reach.

 

***

 

Peggy left Jack drowsing on the sofa, and spent the day at work in the general expectation that he was on the mend and would soon be back to running the office with his usual blend of competent boss, decent agent, and knee-jerk egotist. She didn't make it out of the office until nearly seven, and was strongly tempted to simply go home. 

But ... _"I'll be up for awhile, then back down again,"_ he'd said. And that was the course of malaria; it was a cyclic illness, going into remission for months or years, only to recur later -- sometimes triggered by stress, from what she remembered hearing during the war, and there had certainly been enough of _that_ lately.

Common sense told her that he'd be fine and there was no need to make a special trip out of her way to check on him. But the part of her that won out was the paranoid part that had buried too many people during the war. She had never returned the emergency key, and as she climbed the stairs to Jack's flat, she told herself that all she had to do was briefly check in with him and reassure the nagging voice in the back of her head that he was getting better. Then she could go back to Howard's mansion, kick her shoes off her aching feet, have a bite to eat and a glass of whiskey, and forget all about the SSR _and_ Jack Thompson for awhile.

There was no answer when she knocked on the door. _Because he's in the bedroom, asleep, and will not appreciate you waking him up,_ she told herself. But that little nagging voice was louder now. She knocked again more loudly, with a small sigh for the gossip that her repeated visits were no doubt causing if the neighbors were paying attention.

There was a thump and a muffled crash from inside the flat. 

"Jack?" Peggy called through the door. She waited, tapping off the seconds with her fingernails on the doorframe, and then used the key to let herself in.

The flat was almost pitch dark, the lights off and the city dimming into evening outside the closed blinds. Peggy groped her way to a lamp. Jack wasn't in the living room; the only sign of his presence was a tangled blanket on the sofa and unwashed dishes on the coffee table. The bedroom door stood open, so she tapped at it before girding herself and stepping inside.

He was down on the floor beside the bed, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. When Peggy bent over him, his hand shot out and grabbed her wrist with shocking strength.

"Tell him!" he said urgently. His eyes were open, but glazed, staring in her general vicinity rather than looking directly at her.

"Certainly, I'll tell him," she said, trying to pry his fingers off her wrist. The war had given her practice at dealing with delirious people, and the most useful thing -- really, the only useful thing -- was to politely play along with their delusions as long as it wasn't something dangerous. It kept them from getting more agitated.

And it seemed to get Jack to settle down enough for her to unclamp his hand from her arm, leaving red marks where his fingers had bitten into her skin. He was clearly worse again -- much worse, this time. His clothes and sheets were sweat-soaked, but when she touched his forehead, it was hot and dry. His face was spotted with unhealthy color.

"Jack?" she said loudly, shaking his shoulder.

He tried to jerk away. "For fuck's sake," he said to the wall, "we didn't even get to _bed_ until oh-three-hundred."

Interesting to hear him curse; Peggy's male co-workers usually tried to tone down their language around her, which she found rather quaint. Right now it was a worrisome sign that he didn't recognize her. "Jack," she said, and took his hot face in her hands, turning him to face her. She could feel him shivering. "I need you to speak to me, or I will take you to hospital."

He blinked slowly at her, and then said, in a dazed mumble, "I think my brain is sunburned."

"I'm sure it feels like it," she said, trying not to smile. "Jack, do you know where you are?"

There was another long, drugged pause. He brought up his hands slowly and closed them around her wrists. "Can't stop falling. The room shouldn't be moving, it's not ... Everything's the wrong size."

"You're very ill," she said quietly. "The room isn't moving; it's only you."

He flinched at something she couldn't see. "I should have told him not to put the vest on."

"Who, Jack?"

"Chief. Stop him -- don't let him put the vest on. Please, Peggy. Please stop him."

Oh God. She still revisited that day in her nightmares. "I will," she promised.

Jack's agitation decreased somewhat, and he trailed off into incoherent mumbling. When Peggy tried to help him lie back down, he grabbed at her, holding onto her arm, and then sank down limply until his head was resting on her forearm. 

She put her other hand on his shoulder -- he was wearing the same sweat-soaked pajamas as earlier -- and looked down at the mussed top of his head with an unpleasant mix of concern and irritation. She didn't _want_ to be responsible for Jack Thompson. She definitely didn't want him draping himself on her as if she was the only stable thing in a spinning, shifting world.

 _I need to take him to hospital._

But she didn't think he'd thank her for it, not unless there was absolutely no choice. 

Peggy thought back to her childhood experiences with fevers. One particular incident came to mind, when Michael had caught scarlet fever from Peggy, so she was already recovering and immune while her brother was sick. She remembered her mother bathing him with alcohol to bring his temperature down, and putting him in cold-water baths.

"Jack, we're going to try something. We need to bring your fever down, all right?" 

She struggled to haul him to his feet. He was limp and unbelievably heavy. Peggy struggled with his deadweight, half-supporting and half-dragging him into the bathroom, while he mumbled snatches of one-sided conversations she couldn't quite catch. Peggy deposited him on the bathroom floor while she filled the bath with cool water. 

"I sincerely hope you don't make my life a living hell for this," she remarked, and picked him around his waist. She was capable of moving a good deal of weight as long as she did it quickly, and she deposited him in the tub with a tremendous splash that sent water leaping over the sides of the tub and spreading on the floor around her feet.

The cold water got a reaction out of him, an all-over flinch followed by weak flailing. Peggy held him down, and eventually he subsided. She found a washrag and dipped it in the cool water, splashing it over his heated face and the sweat-stiff spikes of his hair.

"You needed a bath anyway," she remarked.

Her sleeves were wet to the elbows, her skirt water-stained, and now she realized she had a new problem: she couldn't just leave him unattended in the bath. He might slip down and drown, and she didn't want to try to explain to the SSR that she'd accidentally drowned their Chief.

She found a towel to sit on, and brought a couple of newspapers from the living room, along with a pencil stub she dug up in a kitchen drawer. Then she leaned against the wall and worked the crosswords while occasionally reaching over to check the temperature of his skin and the water.

Peggy wasn't sure what time it was, but it was definitely late when Jack woke with a gasp and a jerk, and sat up abruptly. Water slopped over the side of the tub; Peggy quickly moved her legs out of the way. 

"Where's Sousa?" Jack demanded.

"Not here just now," Peggy said, bracing herself for another round of delirium.

"I thought ... that is ..." Jack hesitated, started to sink back down into the water and then jerked forward in surprise at realizing that he was partly submerged. His eyes didn't have that terrible glazed look from earlier; now he only looked exhausted and unwell. He lifted a wet hand and stared at it for a little while, then turned his tired, baffled gaze on her. "Carter, why am I in the bath?" His voice was weak and thready, but coherent.

"Cold water," Peggy explained, setting the half-finished crossword aside. "For your fever. I decided to try it first, rather than take you to hospital. Would you like to get out now?"

"No, I prefer to sleep in a bathtub full of cold water, thanks."

Definitely feeling better, at least somewhat. She helped him out of the tub and into the bedroom, getting both herself and the carpet hopelessly soaked in the process, and left him on the floor while she went to find him some dry clothes. He seemed to be wearing his only pair of pajamas, but she found some loose trousers and a knitted jumper in the closet, and laid them on the bed. Jack was swaying where he sat, holding himself up with a hand against the wall. 

"I imagine that you don't want help getting dressed," Peggy said.

He made a vague handwave motion at the door. Peggy withdrew, and busied herself making tea, heavily sweetened. She made a cup for herself as well, and gulped most of it before going back to knock on the door. "Are you decent?"

There was an acknowledging grunt. Peggy came in to find Jack changed into dry clothes and flopped on the bed, his cheek pressed into his pillow while his wet hair soaked it. She should've brought him a towel. Oh well. Nursemaiding was not her strong suit.

"Tea," she said, setting it on the bedside table. "Water. Drugs." She shook out tablets and Jack propped himself up to swallow them. He took them, she noticed, without even looking at what they were. Maybe because he felt too unwell to argue; maybe because he trusted her that much. Odd thought, that.

After swallowing the pills, he stayed propped up on his elbow for a moment, gazing at her. He looked young like this; his hair was a scruffy half-dried mess, and the jumper was a little too large, the sleeves coming halfway down his hands. It was the sort of thing a person wore to be comfortable, not stylish; she hadn't even realized Jack owned anything of the sort.

"Why are you doing this, Marge?" he asked in the weak, raspy whisper that seemed to have replaced his usual self-assured tones.

She'd offered a flippant answer when he'd asked the same question a couple of days ago, baffled to find her in his bedroom, but tonight she couldn't muster the same attitude. She was tired, her clothes were wet, she hadn't eaten anything since lunch ... and she really had thought, for a little while, that he might die. It was just hitting her, the way things always did after a crisis, when the need for decisive action and a level head had passed. 

She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed her skirt over her knees with a hand that shook slightly. "I don't know," she admitted quietly. "Perhaps I thought no one should have to go through this alone."

His tired smile was wry. "So you would'a done it for anybody."

Peggy raised an eyebrow. "Well, yes. I do like to think that if I found even Dottie Underwood sprawled on the floor, severely ill and hallucinating, I'd do more than merely step over her and go on about my business."

"Touché." He flopped on the pillow, but was still watching her. "Hey, Carter."

She made a polite noise of inquiry.

"You should talk to Sousa."

Peggy frowned at him. What _had_ he been hallucinating earlier, exactly? "Why are you bringing up Daniel?"

"I dunno. Dreams ... reminded me ..." He raised a hand and let it fall to the bed. "You ought to call him."

For some reason that stung, as if she'd failed to do her duty as Daniel's friend. "I _have_ done. I left messages. He's ... busy, with the new office."

Jack laughed a little, sleepily. "I'm sure he is. Just. Call 'im again."

"I shouldn't think it's any of your business," she said, but there wasn't much snap in her voice. "Go to sleep."

He gave a grunt that might have been acknowledgment or protest, but he'd been fading ever since his head had landed on the pillow, and he was asleep in moments. Peggy dragged a blanket over him, kicked the sheets on the floor out of the way, and left, closing the bedroom door.

She cleaned up the mess in the bathroom and then sat down wearily on the sofa. It was after midnight; she was exhausted and, she realized, starving. She contemplated the possibility of a dinner consisting of stale bread before talking herself into going home.

 _I am not his nursemaid or his mother,_ she told herself firmly, _and I am not obligated to live at his flat simply because he hasn't the sense to check himself into a hospital like a sensible person._

Still, as a sop to her conscience, she left a fresh cup of tea on his bedside table and checked his temperature with the back of her hand -- it seemed to be considerably down -- before leaving.

Weary to the bone, she dragged herself through the door of the Stark residence to find the kitchen lights on, and Angie sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine. "What is going on with you lately, English?" she wanted to know, taking in Peggy's bedraggled appearance.

"It's a long and annoying story," Peggy sighed. "Please tell me there's something to eat."

Supplied with wine and food, she told Angie the story, at least the salient bits. There were a few things she considered too personal to share, especially tonight's memory of Jack wilting on her arm, sick and disoriented and shockingly trusting.

"My Uncle Ferdie had malaria," Angie said. "He was in the Merchant Marines. I never saw it happen myself, but Aunt Edna said he used'ta take off all his clothes and go wandering down the street."

Peggy shuddered. "Thank heaven _that_ hasn't been a problem. No, he's surprisingly easy to deal with." Almost disturbingly so. She hadn't _wanted_ to nursemaid Jack Thompson in the slightest, but he was actually a very tractable patient. It made her think, again, of Belarus, and particularly the way he'd been on the flight back: quiet and sad and polite, very different from the abrasive, slickly confident agent she was used to working with.

_Everyone thinks I'm this guy that I never was ..._

But, she thought as she took her glass of wine off to the bathroom for a quick bath before collapsing into bed, it wasn't true that Jack's work persona _wasn't_ him. He'd made the decision to paint himself in glowing colors for the world to see, and then to try to live up to that ideal -- and that was all him; the bad choices he'd made were all him. And so was the brash, competent agent, who she really _did_ trust at her back in the field, holding everyone at arm's length; and so was the sick, tired man who'd leaned into her as if he'd found his island of safety -- who had been worried about her, too, even if the only way he had of showing it was in veiled questions and halfhearted orders.

Howard being Howard, all the bathrooms were well supplied with expensive bath products. Peggy made herself a strawberry-scented bubble bath. She needed it tonight.

She thought of Daniel as she sank into the bubbles. It wasn't just Jack bringing him up that had him on her mind; she often wished she could get his opinion, and tonight she ached to talk all of this over with him. She missed that more than anything, Daniel's stable sensibility and easy, common-sense approach to things. 

It had been easier to get along with Jack when Daniel was there, she realized now, if only because it was so helpful to have someone to commiserate with on those days when Jack was being a lot more _Jack_ than usual. Sometimes it felt as if the two of them were like a stool that had lost its third leg, wobbling and unstable without Daniel's steadying influence.

The last couple of days had reminded her how easy being around Jack _could_ be, when it wasn't a constant struggle. And having Daniel around had made it less of a fight.

She sighed, and sank down in the bath until the bubbles tickled her nose. 

Maybe she would call him again. One of these days.

 

***

 

The last fever seemed to be the one that turned the tide. Peggy didn't stop by until evening, whereupon she found Jack bundled in a blanket on the sofa, alert and very cranky. He complained that she hadn't brought food with her this time. 

"I'm not your personal delivery girl," Peggy snapped, but she was hungry too, so she walked down the street to get them both sandwiches. She ate sitting on the back of his sofa, swinging her legs. Jack offered her coffee; Peggy obstinately made herself tea.

"So I'll be at work on Monday at the latest," Jack said, one hand snaking out from under the blanket to reach for his coffee cup. "Probably come in on Sunday to catch up."

"Really." It was Friday evening now. She cast a skeptical eye on the way his hand was shaking as he picked up the coffee mug.

"Come on, Carter. This isn't my first time on this merry-go-round, okay?"

Peggy shrugged and let it go. "In that case, I'll bring you a finalized plan for the Red Hook warehouse sting on Monday. Provided you manage to avoid walking off with any important papers between now and then."

"I can see you don't plan to let that go." He snorted. "Look who's talking, anyway. Didn't you once _lose_ a police report right in the middle of a case I was working ... on ..."

She could see the light dawn. It was very gratifying.

"Wait just a minute. That time with Jarvis and the stolen car report." Jack stared at her. "That was all a ploy, wasn't it? You _conned Dooley."_

"I don't know how disappointed to be in your deductive reasoning skills, Jack, that you're just now figuring that out."

His mouth was open. He closed it; then his eyes narrowed and he gave her a searching look. "You're a piece of work sometimes, Carter."

"Thank you, Chief," she said. "I do try."

 

***

 

Peggy didn't normally take weekends off, but this Saturday Angie had invited her along on a Martinelli family picnic, celebrating a cousin's engagement. She went, and ended up having a wonderful time. She didn't get into the office until Sunday afternoon. As on most weekends, the office was staffed by a skeleton crew, and she was unsurprised to see that the light in Jack's office was on.

She always enjoyed working on a weekend, because it was possible to get her work done without interruptions, and she finished laying out a solid plan for the warehouse sting in record time. She'd even incorporated Jack's suggestion about putting men on the roof; it _was_ a security gap, after all.

She got up, tucked the files under her arm, and went to the half-closed door of Jack's office.

He was sitting with his cheek propped on his fist, gazing vacantly at a surveillance request form on the desk in front of him; there was a pile of signed ones at his elbow, sloppily stacked amid the paperwork chaos on his desk. 

Peggy cleared her throat and tapped on the door, and he jerked and sat up straight. "Carter," he said, blinking at her and trying to look alert.

"Working yourself into a relapse is an excellent plan," she pointed out. Jack scowled at her and glanced quickly around, as if worried that someone might have heard. Peggy refrained womanfully from rolling her eyes and shoved the files across the desk to him. "Revised plan for the warehouse raid. If you sign off on it, I can have everything ready by a week from next Saturday."

"Two weeks out? Why?" But he answered his own question: "You're giving me a chance to get back up to fighting shape, aren't you?"

"You don't _have_ to be there."

"You're going after HYDRA tech. There's going to be a lot of scrutiny on this one."

"And a not-insignificant chance of potential glory to be won." There was no chance Jack was going to stay away from this case if there was the potential to make himself look good in front of the media.

"Carter --"

"Just look it over," she said, rising. "If you don't find anything to object to -- though we should all be so lucky -- then you'll also find the necessary forms are within, awaiting your signature."

Jack looked like he wanted to protest, but she'd made sure everything was in order, every "t" crossed and "i" dotted, so all he managed to muster as he flipped through the top pages was a grunt. Peggy turned to leave.

"Nice job," he said to her back, quietly.

She didn't think he was just talking about the paperwork.

 

***

 

On Monday, Jack was -- outwardly, at least -- back to normal. He deflected the inevitable questions about DC with jokes about the weather and the traffic, circulated around the office to drop in on conversations in his usual glad-handing way, and dumped a heap of filing on the unlucky intern who was serving as his adjutant today.

Peggy never _quite_ caught him drooping over his desk the way she had on Sunday, but she thought it was interesting that no one else seemed to notice his unusual pallor, or the way he was out the door precisely on the dot of five.

For a group of spies, this lot gave her cause to wonder sometimes ...

But, then, she hadn't noticed anything through the months they'd been working together, either.

And the extra awkwardness she'd expected never materialized. Things were still awkward in their usual way, an uneasy vacillation between rivalry and the unconsciously easy working relationship they sometimes enjoyed. It seemed they both shared a tacit agreement not to talk about what had happened. Forward, not back -- Peggy appreciated that.

Jack was still very ... Jack.

But when the warehouse case was over and the SSR was triumphantly mopping up the black marketeers and crates of confiscated HYDRA prototypes, the inevitable mix of reporters and city councilmen descended on Jack like sharks scenting fresh blood ... and he grinned and cheerfully deflected them in Peggy's direction. "That's the lead agent on the operation," he beamed at them. "She's the one you want to talk to."

"She?" one of the reporters said.

"Yes, she; that one right there. Am I speaking Chinese? Go to it and let me get some work done."

Peggy's initial rush of startled delight faded quickly as she realized that she now had to fend off reporters and skeptical-yet-intrigued politicians while also trying to do her job. In her more uncharitable moments, she had to suspect Jack of taking the opportunity to foist yet another bit of gruntwork (dealing with the press) onto her.

"GIRL AGENT NABS CROOKS!" screamed the _Daily News_ , while the _Times_ went with a much more staid "FEDERAL AGENTS BREAK UP SMUGGLING RING," with Peggy's actual role buried in tiny print on the jump page.

But it wasn't the headlines that Peggy remembered afterwards; it was the two reporters, among the herd of them, who were women. One was writing for a small Tri-State weekly, the other for the school newspaper of Barnard College, a Manhattan women's college. Both hung on her every word and asked her sensible questions.

Theirs were the only two articles that Peggy folded up and put in her desk drawer.

Though perhaps she might send the _Times_ article home to Mum.

**Author's Note:**

> Sundry medical research notes:
> 
> I am, as usual, taking some creative license for fanfic purposes, in this case with malaria symptoms. Chronic malaria would probably have had more long-term effects than just recurring bouts of h/c-friendly fever (such as anemia, fatigue, and possible brain damage/personality changes, among other things); also, there are multiple strains of malaria with slightly different symptoms, and I'm basically just rolling them all into one so that I can pick and choose my symptoms as desired. :D
> 
> It is weirdly difficult to find solid information on how common malaria was among troops in the Pacific war theater. But it definitely was an issue they had to deal with, and a number of servicemen and other personnel contracted it, along with other diseases such as dengue fever and typhus. (I'm currently reading a book on American women in the war, and the nurses who worked in the Pacific war talk about dealing with malaria cases, as well as some of them contracting it too.) The military issued antimalarial medication to the troops, but if you think about the supply-chain issues, plus side effects, plus the problem of getting everyone to reliably and consistently take their pills ... well, malaria was still a problem for troops in Vietnam too, even 20-30 years of medical advances later.
> 
> This fic also required me to research period over-the-counter painkillers. Aspirin apparently is bad to take if you have malaria, because it can accelerate the disease's damage to red blood cells and make the symptoms worse. In the 1940s, Tylenol/paracetamol hadn't really caught on yet (although they knew about it). A much more widespread over-the-counter pain reliever/fever reducer was phenacetin, which is no longer used today because it turned out to have carcinogenic and kidney-damaging properties when used long-term (it was banned in the 1980s, after being quite common beforehand). In small doses, such as used in this fic, there was probably nothing wrong with it; lots of people used it for everyday painkilling, and Tylenol, after all, can destroy the liver. Phenacetin was also commonly sold in a compound drug that also contained aspirin and caffeine, which was used as a cold remedy.


End file.
